Running on people power
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UMR’s Human-Powered Vehicle Team, national champions in 2002 and 2003, gears up for a "threepeat" in 2004.
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| UMR’s Human-Powered Vehicle, the Black Widow, takes the lead in the 2003 competition. |
Last May, the UMR team won its second national championship, racing its aerodynamically designed "superbike" to victory in a competition against a dozen other university teams. It was the second victory in as many years for UMR, which won the 2002 competition and placed second in the 2001 event.
This spring, the team plans defend its championship at two different HPV competitions: the West Coast event to be held April 23-25 in Corvallis, Oregon, and hosted by Oregon State, and the East Coast competition, hosted by the University of Florida, May 7-9 in Gainesville, Fla.
The team has taken an incremental approach to become better with every year.
"Our team has matured over the past few years," says Robert Stone, assistant professor of basic engineering and the Human-Powered Vehicle Team’s advisor. "Since their second-place showing in 2001, they have really been able to build on the previous year’s design knowledge and make significant advances."
The competition, sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, involves teams from colleges and universities throughout the United States. The teams enter their vehicles in three different categories: design review and presentation, sprint race, and endurance race.
